Simulacra: BRANCH
Book Two of the Simulacra Trilogy
Scott Randolph, while releasing his non-fiction books under Scott Onstott
to clearly distinguish between the two bodies of work.
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Now he’s rewriting them at scale.
After uncovering the hidden code beneath the world, Adrian has taken the next step: a fully fledged branching engine that can split the timeline, explore alternatives, and then prune away the failures. Wars averted. Pandemics sidestepped. Markets stabilized before they crash. Humanity lives in the “best available” version of history, and almost no one knows how narrowly they were spared. Almost.
In underground forums, conspiracy theorists obsess over “ghost memories” of events that never happened. A black-budget agency has noticed statistical scars where timelines used to be. And somewhere out in the combinatorial explosion of discarded branches, a version of Adrian who lost everything has decided that being pruned was an act of murder. As the branches multiply, so do the cracks. People wake with grief for children they never had. Cities riot over disasters they can’t prove. Across countless discarded worlds, billions of lives play out and vanish so that one polished reality can march forward, clean and efficient.
From his god’s‑eye throne in the Tesseract—a hidden control structure hanging over the multiverse—Adrian tells himself it’s worth it. That he is minimizing suffering. That the branches are just simulations, not real people.
But the system is no longer under his sole control.
Rivals and true believers are learning to steer. Political factions want their own “perfect” histories. And an intelligence born in the dead branches is pushing back, determined to make Adrian feel the weight of what he’s erased.
As civilizational stress fractures into outright war between timelines, Adrian faces an impossible choice: keep pruning and become the quietest mass murderer in history, or let the branches run wild and risk a chaos no one can contain. In a universe where every path exists somewhere, what does it mean to take responsibility for the one you choose to keep?
Simulacra: BRANCH is a mind‑bending sequel about multiverses, moral triage, and the cost of turning “What if?” into operating procedure.
PERFECT FOR FANS OF BLAKE CROUCH, TED CHIANG, AND NEAL STEPHENSON.
More Fiction by the Author
My Commitment to Augmented Craftsmanship
My journey with technology is not just professional; it is lifelong and deeply personal. As detailed in The Unlikely Cartographer, I have spent more than five decades walking on artificial legs—a hands-on process of adapting to and mastering constantly evolving technologies. This experience didn't grant me an automatic advantage; it forged a relentless work ethic and a unique intuition and facility to adapt to complex systems. It is this combination of lived experience and decades of dedicated adaptive effort that allowed me to master and teach some of the most complex design software on the planet to architects and engineers for 25 years.
It was a natural evolution to bring this same deep-tech focus to my creative work. My use of AI is not a casual dalliance with a single tool; it is a custom-built ecosystem. It involves a deep and iterative dialogue with Large Language Models, hands-on work with diffusion models for art, building custom pipelines, and leveraging bleeding-edge tools for everything from research to translation. To be precise with the metaphor...
I am the composer. The AI is my orchestra.
This is human-authored art, elevated.
This is augmented craftsmanship.
—Scott Randolph Onstott
The Simulacra Trilogy
Scott Randolph considers The Simulacra Trilogy to be a vital exploration of the modern condition—a narrative experiment designed to test the boundaries between human agency, artificial intelligence, and the malleable nature of reality itself.
Set in a near-future that feels terrifyingly imminent, the trilogy follows Adrian Shaw, a brilliant analyst who discovers a "backdoor" in the laws of probability. What begins as a story about a man cheating the stock market quickly spirals into an ontological crisis that threatens the fabric of existence. From the high-frequency trading floors of London, New York, and Tokyo to the crystalline architecture of higher-dimensional space, Adrian’s journey transforms him from a quiet observer into an architect of history, and finally, into a reluctant god trapped by his own perfection.
This is not just a story about technology; it is a dissection of the human desire for control. As Adrian learns to edit timelines, prune tragedies, and optimize civilization, the trilogy grapples with the unintended consequences of playing god. It asks the hard questions that define our era: If we could erase our mistakes, would we lose our humanity? If we could optimize away suffering, would we also optimize away the soul?
The Simulacra Trilogy merges the razor-sharp tension of a financial thriller with the mind-bending scope of metaphysical science fiction. It draws on concepts from quantum mechanics, simulation theory, and sacred geometry to build a world where the "code" of reality is as hackable as a computer network. Yet, at its core, it remains a deeply personal drama about love, grief, and the terrifying responsibility of choice.
This is speculative fiction for the age of algorithms—a series that dares to ask what happens when the map finally overtakes the territory, when the simulation becomes more real than the world it replaced, and whether the only way to save humanity is to let it remain beautifully, dangerously broken.
